Loading and playing a flash swf slideshow on my website

NJMAN

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I have a question for anyone who knows about optimizing swf flash files for websites. I have a 15 MB flash slide show on my website which displays my portfolio.

It was created with an automated program, so I dont have the actionscript source code, and there arent any options that I know of to optimize the size while creating it, except to degrade the image quality. It has about 25 embedded images at 800x500 72 ppi, and its set to music. The mp3 is embedded at around 5 MB.

Its only meant for high speed users. But it takes at least 3-4 minutes to load before playing, even for high speed dsl or cable. I've tested it on both.

Does anyone have any tips on how to load this faster, or make it start playing while its loading, or maybe how to reduce the file size in some way, so that it loads faster. How do some of these other pro photog sites do it? Do they store the image info in an xml file and link the mp3 externally?

My images look very sharp in the slideshow right now, so I dont want to do anything to reduce the quality. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

NJ
 
Have you tried some minor compression to see if the images are noticeably affected. I've heard that you can apply some compression without losing any quality that can be seen on a screen. It's worth a try and if it doesn't work you're no worse off. Unfortaunately, you probably won't get too much of a reduction in size but every little bit helps. :)
 
Thanks MACollum. After getting some input from Digital Matt as well, it looks like the bloating comes from the mp3. There is a compression option for music in the program Im using. I need to check into that a bit more. I think I may be able to load the mp3 externally as well. Regarding the images, Im going to try loading those externally as well from a subfolder, so that I dont have to reduce the quality. That should give me quite a bit of increased performance.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. :)
 
Didn't this topic get posted in another thread already? I remember posting... and its not in this thread.
 

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